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Councilmember: Facts on Ride Free Area need to be clarified

King County Councilmember Reagan Dunn said Tuesday in an e-mail to the Downtown Seattle Association that some facts needed to be clarified about a plan to charge Seattle more money for Metro’s downtown Ride Free Area.

Dunn and three other councilmembers say Seattle should be paying millions more for the agreement to offset fares that aren’t not collected, which would help toward solving Metro’s staggering budget deficit.

“We did not make this proposal with an intention to end the ride free area. However, our citizens are facing a potential 20% cut in bus service. We cannot afford to ignore any potential revenue stream because it’s politically unpopular,” said Dunn, who represents rural southeastern King County, in the e-mail.

“Seattle can choose to work with us to come up with a rate that is fair and equitable or they can decide that the ride free area isn’t worth the money. Either way, this would result in significantly more revenue to help ease Metro’s funding challenges,” he said.

This week, Dunn and other councilmembers received a letter from Jon Scholes, the DSA’s public policy director, urging them to consider the proposal’s potential impact to downtown bus service and commuters from all over King County.

Dunn said operating the free ride zone costs King County Metro an estimated $7 million in fares that would otherwise be collected.

His e-mail explains how councilmembers arrive at that estimate:

“In our $7 million estimate, we took the 11,000,000 yearly riders and multiplied them by $1.67, which is the average fair for the entire system. This fare captures all of the riders who have passes, a concern you raised in your e-mail. That’s why the fare is below the lowest rate paid by any individual rider in the system. That calculation gives you the amount of revenue Metro would collect if all ride free users paid a fare – $18,370,000. It’s obviously not reasonable to assume that everyone would continue to ride the bus if they had to pay a fare, so we discounted that number by 50% to $9,185,000. Then we discounted that rate by another 25% to give Seattle credit for the benefit that Metro receives through reduced travel times, which makes the total price $6,888,750.

Let’s assume that you disagree that 50% of people would still ride the bus and you think it’s more like 25%. That still argues for a $4, 592,500 rate. By any objective analysis, the amount that Seattle should pay is in the millions of dollars rather than the hundreds of thousands.”

Seattle currently pays about $400,000 per year under a contract signed in 1973 that has since expired.

“As a business organization, I’m sure you would not recommend that King County continue operating under an expired agreement and collecting what amounts to a severely discounted rate. That’s not good business and it certainly isn’t good government,” Dunn said.

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